Total Guitar, April 2004
In a sense, you bring an acoustic rhythm approach to your electric playing. Would you agree?
“I guess so. I play both mediums a lot but what you’re talking about is how I strum really hard. It’s hard to say if one influences the other, because i don’t give it a lot of thought. As far as the strength of my right wrist goes, that comes from punk, from solely playing downstrokes. Punk is what I started playing, and that’s where all my power comes from.
The delicacy and finesse in my right wrist comes from having played so much with Flea. We spent hours playing funk grooves together. I probably express myself more through rhythm guitar, but at the same time it’s not something I’m conscious of.”
Would you describe yourself as a soloist in the traditional sense?
“When it comes to soloing, I’m more interested in doing things texturally with the guitar, trying to come up with ways of playing I find interesting. And for me the rock star guitar soloing approach is a dead end. I can’t see many people taking it anywhere different. And for me, the most interesting guitar players e’ve had over the last 20 years haven’t been soloists. They’ve been people like Bernard Summer from Joy Division and New Order, Johnny Marr from The Smiths, Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, Kurt Cobain. These people all did interesting things with their sound and lead guitar parts, but it’s not flashy.
Flashy guitar playing reached a peak with Jimmy Page and I don’t think anybody’s taken it any further since, although Eddie Van Halen took it to an interesting place. I’d love it if a guitarist came along and did some kind of flashy lead guitar that interested me, instead, I’m more excited by people who work with sound and know the ways in which an electric guitar can be turned into many different instruments. If you just limit yourself to the electric guitar from the blues-lead guitar standpoint, it’s just a few instruments. But if you look at what Keith Levine did with Public Image on their first couple of albums, it’s a different instrument for every song. Electric guitar can be so many things.
Sometimes when I play live with the Chili Peppers I get into that flashy rock star lead guitar thing, but that’s because I’m feeding off the energy of the audience. It’s not something I’m interested in musically. Musically, I think lead guitar playing should make a textural sonic statement within the song, or it should be as beautiful and melodic as something you’d sing.”
A key factor of your soloing is the melodic aspect. Where do those choices of notes come from?
“ I usually try to create some sort of interesting juxtaposition between what Flea’s playing and what I’m doing – I work in the space that’s created between us. I think more about shaping the space between the guitar and bass rather than, ‘What can I do over this?’ The theoretical things I think of have more to do with creating space.”
Does a song like Dosed, from the Chili Peppers’ last album, represent this light and dark aspect?
“I actually came up with that sound when the rest of the band was outside taking a break during rehearsal. I was in the studio playing around with that Line 6 green loop pedal and made a loop of one guitar part, then added another and another. I had those three guitar lines playing, and I was jamming over that. By the tme everybody else came in, I had this beautiul loop going and that’s what the song is. On the record, I played each part on its own, so we could spread it out in stereo.”
On the new solo record, are you thinking in those same terms, rhythmically and solo-wise?
“With my stuff I’m not so much thinking about the space between me and somebody else, I’m thinking how I can embellish the song. Something like the solo at the end of Omission was really just about the idea of having this grand ending, then having a solo with a small Tom Verlaine-type tone. That’s probably a [Fender] Jaguar.”
How would you describe the rhythm track in Cabron?
“That song’s inspired by Martin Barre’s guitar playing in Jethro Tull on Aqualung. I learned all the songs on that album, because he uses the capo on every tune. I just started to write something like that. The fact that it ended up sounding Mexican has more to do with Anthony’s vocal and Chad’s drums than it does my guitar part. If you just analyse the guitar, it’s coming from a more prog rock standpoint – it’s a real flashy, busy guitar line.”
In a sense, would you say you balance Anthony’s melodic, rhythmic vocals with your guitar parts in a type of call-and-answer routine?
“No, the parts really don’t work like that – Anthony’s vocal answers my guitar. The guitar always comes before the vocals in the Chili Peppers, so when you hear them both doing the same thing it’s usually because he’s singing alone to me. For instance, on Don’t Forget Me I wanted the verse to switch between a machine-like sound to a flowing tone, so I alternate between left-hand trills to the machine-like thing.
That song is a great example of Flea playing the same bassline over and over for like half an hour while I play different guitar parts alongside. And those were probably just the first ones that came into my head. Then Flea stepped on his fuzz, I stomped on my wah that was turned to the trebliest position, and the chorus basically came from that.
Actually, you should listen to a live version of that song to truly hear how I wanted it to sound, because on the record Rick [Rubin, producer] made the harmonies much louder and turned the guitar down in the chorus. Thing is, the idea was to have that song’s chorus sounding like a really overdriven, heavy over-the-edge kinda thing. Hear it on the B side to one of this album’s singles.”
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